First Impressions
by M. the Inspector
Summary: How they meet. Jack Sparrow, twelve years old, has been looking for Hector Barbossa all day long... R&R!


Jack Sparrow, twelve years old or thereabouts, trudged up the hill to the abandoned church. He went around back to the cemetery and hopped the rusty gate, and there among the tombstones…

_Yep that's him._ The man was digging. He looked up once, saw that the intruder was just a kid, and went back to what he was doing without so much as a hello. Jack perched on a crumbling stone angel and looked him over.

His beard was bushy and had bits of grey in it - a strong recommendation since it was comparatively rare for a pirate to last past forty. He also seemed to have both legs and both eyes, although there was a bloody banadge over part of his face that made it difficult to tell. The huge pile of earth he was working on was fresh and there was no headstone, suggesting that he had dug the entire grave himself. He was filling it in now, shovelling dirt tirelessly in on whatever poor-

"Can I help you?" he snarled finally, tossing his hair back off his face for a better look.

Jack deemed it time to partially explain himself. He hopped down from the angel and minced over, carefully avoiding stepping on where people's heads would be because he had always heard it was bad luck to step on the head of a dead man. "Mr. Hector Barbossa?"

"Aye, s'me."

"I've been looking everywhere for you," Jack said. "Nobody seemed to know where you'd got off to."

Barbossa shrugged. "I keep me business to m'self. I don't suppose you're lookin for trouble of some kind?"

"Thanks, but no. I just wanted to meet you." He stared up into Barbossa's face. "You have very interesting eyes."

Barbossa pushed off a tendril of hair that was stuck to his sweaty forehead, leaving himself a great smudge of dirt instead. "In my experience it be the _man _tries to seduce the _boy,_" he chuckled. He turned back to the grave he was filling in. "And I'm not interested."

Jack laughed a little himself and sat down on a different headstone - this time, one much closer to where Barbossa was working. "So who are you burying?"

"Very dear friend. Name of Delilah."

Jack was too young and his education too patchy to draw any conclusions from that. "What happened - if you don't mind my asking?" _If he says "she had it coming" or "I didn't mean to" then that'll be a dealbreaker right there._

"Bullet."

Jack had a flash of intuition. "A bullet meant for you."

"Aye." Barbossa stuck the spade in the pile of dirt and leaned on it. He reached out to tap Jack on the head. "Sha'ered. Then it bounced off and got me here." His hand went to his bandaged cheek.

"I'm sorry," Jack said after a moment of silence.

"Mmn." The pirate did a passable job of pretending to shrug it off. "There always be more where she came from." But then he spoiled it by adding: "Here - see. We had an artist aboard for a bit, and I had her portrait done. Pretty, eh?" He tossed Jack what looked to be a pocket-watch and Jack opened it up right away, before the pirate could think to change his mind and snatch it back. He knew he'd gotten lucky and caught Barbossa at a rare vulnerable moment - any other time it would be completely out of the question to look at or talk about his lost love.

Oh. Jack stared at the tiny painting. "She's... a monkey."

"Aye. Bout that big." Barbossa showed with his hands and then went back to work. "Little lady's not left my side since we started out. I'll miss her, I really will."

"I'm... sorry," Jack said again. Someone with such devotion to a monkey, and such utter disregard for his human companions...

"So you never did say what's your business here," the pirate reminded a moment later.

"You're the one said it's best to keep one's business to oneself, eh?"

Barbossa gave him a dirty look. "Kid, you'd have to be a whole lot stupider'n you look to think that applies when I _be _the very business you're here about. Y'said ye came lookin for me. Why?"

Jack looked into his strange pale eyes one more time. "No," he decided finally, "I don't think you're the business I'm here about after all. Sorry to have bothered you."

He hopped down from the tombstone and went to look up the other two names his mother had mentioned as possibilities.

* * *

The End. 


End file.
